Tuesday 28th October 00:23
Delta Lloyd, Matthew Gregory (Navigator)
I’ve devised a scale that, pretty much, describes the emotional spectrum of sailing in the Volvo Ocean Race. The scale is from 0 to 10 and is of increasing levels of ‘intensity’:
0. Sleep
1. Boredom
2. Zen-like
3. Enjoyable
4. Humorous and fun
5. Fantastical thrill
6. Competitive intensity
7. Frustration
8. Exhaustion
9. Fear
10. Shear terror and survival
Ideally cruising through this race in the middle ranges of 3-6, with plenty of 0 thrown in would be the perfect way to race around the world. This is pretty much how our leg has gone so far. However, right now I’m not in that range. Today I am living in Zone 9: Fear. There is a storm brewing. A very big one.
If you lived along the coast in the south of the USA you’d be boarding up your windows and driving your car inland if you saw this storm coming your way. We are sailing towards it right now. The low pressure system to our south is going to merge with another low to the south east, unifying into a deep depression of 970 mb. This system will generate gale force winds. This storm is a gateway to hell. My job over the next 5 days is to make sure that we don’t fall into it and that both boat and crew get to Cape Town in one piece.
For the past day we have been preparing. We’ve tidied up the boat with a bunch of small maintenance jobs. We have organised our stack of gear so that all emergency and repair equipment is ready to deploy if we need it. We’ve added carbon laminate to our damaged jumper spreader….oh, I hope that you haven’t forgotten about our damaged mast. Have you? We certainly have not. Ever since we’ve completed the repair well over a week ago, we’ve been sailing on port tack. The damaged spreader is on the starboard side of the mast and we haven’t loaded or tested it’s strength yet. There is an impending gibe in our future that will coincide with a cold front crossing over us as the storm deepens to our south.
We are in Zone 9. My job is to make sure that I don’t put the boat in a location that escalates us to zone 10. These boats are so powerful that they don’t need a breath of wind over 25 knots to set the ocean on fire. However, our weather routing software is much braver than I am. It will seek maximum wind speeds to get us to Cape Town as quickly as possible.
To tame the weather routing software, for wind speeds over 25 knots, I told the program that our boat speed would only be 5 knots. This is not the case in reality of course, but it manually forces the router to hunt through the weather model forecast to generate routes that keep us in wind speeds under 25knots. Over the next week, the hot seat will be smoking as I try to balance survival, keeping the boat in one piece and racing our competitors. It’s a difficult equation to optimize…but challenges like this are what make being a navigator so invigorating.
The screen shot from my routing program, shows the two of the many options that I’m considering for our track to Cape Town. One option represents the scary route, and the other shows the sensible way to get to Cape Town…you might be surprised that both arrive in Cape Town at almost the exact same time….
(Received 00:23 GMT)